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Size and The City: Productivity, Match Quality and Wage Inequality

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  • Yip, Chi Man

Abstract

This paper elucidates the impact of city growth on wage and wage inequality using a search-theoretical approach. Firms differ in capital intensity and land intensity of the jobs created. When a worker meets a job via a matching technology, a match-specific productivity level is realized and they sign a job contract when they agree with the bargaining wage. A rise in population density leads to rental increment. As a consequence, a higher expected flow profit is required for the creation of a good job. Rent-sharing ensures an increase of the average wage in the good-job sector. This, in turn, increases the reservation wage of workers in the equilibrium. Although the rental increment does not affect the setup costs in the bad-job sector, higher realized productivity level is required to cover higher reservation wage. Since only job contacts with realized productivity levels exceeding reservation productivity threshold are observed, such increase in the threshold raises also the average wage in the bad-job sector. Hence, the average productivity, the match quality and wage go up in each sector unambiguously, giving rise to urban wage premium. In addition, this paper predicts that urbanization widens residual wage inequality of a city. Existing empirical evidence is presented to support the implications of this model.

Suggested Citation

  • Yip, Chi Man, 2011. "Size and The City: Productivity, Match Quality and Wage Inequality," MPRA Paper 31255, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:31255
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Urban Wage Premium; Match Quality; Job Match;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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